Today in Supreme Court History: July 24, 1997

7/24/1997: Justice William Brennan dies.

Justice William Brennan

 

Comments

[Supremacy Claus]

Of course, Gideon was guilty, with a pocket full of quarters after the break into a cigarette machine, and a pick up by a cab driver from the scene. The real heist was $trillion in worthless make work jobs for lawyers. The decision was 9-0 in favor of scumbag lawyer thievin'. This career criminal's back of envelope cert writ is in a glass case at Constitution Hall, lit like a religious icon. He was realeased, drank, beat the girlfriend, soon died of alcohol liver failure. This slick lawyer client would have lived much longer in prison. The scumbag career criminal should never have been streeted by the scumbag lawyer profession after age 16.

1. The Defendant’s Likely Guilt
Clarence Earl Gideon was likely guilty based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence (seen with coins and beer shortly after a robbery at a pool hall).

His acquittal at retrial may have stemmed from skilled lawyering rather than innocence—suggesting that legal procedural rights triumphed over factual guilt, leading to concerns about justice being distorted by courtroom theatrics.

2. Judicial Overreach and Federal Mandate
Gideon overruled Betts v. Brady (1942), imposing a nationwide mandate on states to provide counsel in all felony cases, regardless of local conditions or resource capacity.

Critics see this as an example of judicial activism, where the Court created new obligations not originally contemplated by the Constitution's framers, especially via selective incorporation.

3. Rent-Seeking and Lawyer Class Expansion
Gideon guaranteed a new stream of government-funded clients, effectively creating a publicly subsidized market for lawyers, even when legal representation may not materially affect outcomes.

This created a lawyer rent-seeking dynamic: attorneys—especially in the criminal defense bar—benefit from constitutionally mandated work, regardless of efficiency or efficacy.

In economic terms, this is a transfer of taxpayer money to a politically protected professional class under the guise of civil rights.

4. Massive Job Creation for a Toxic Legal Profession
The decision triggered a boom in public defender offices, legal aid systems, and indigent defense contractors—institutionalizing a large sector of the legal profession with little performance accountability.

Many criminal defense attorneys are overworked, undertrained, or cynically adversarial, contributing to a culture where legal process is treated as a zero-sum combat sport rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.

Critics argue Gideon helped create and entrench a toxic adversarial legal culture, incentivizing delay, obstruction, and tactical maneuvering over substantive justice.

5. Administrative Burdens and Costs
States were required to fund indigent defense systems, leading to:

Rising criminal justice expenditures

Procedural complexity

Delays in the system

These costs are borne by taxpayers and divert resources from prevention or rehabilitation efforts, arguably making the system more inefficient and less humane.

6. Dilution of the Right to Counsel
The proliferation of public defenders led to overloaded caseloads, sometimes exceeding 300–500 cases per lawyer per year.

In practice, this means the "right to counsel" often becomes the right to ineffective or symbolic counsel, undermining the very fairness Gideon promised.

Defense lawyers may recommend plea deals without full investigation—assembly-line justice masquerading as constitutional protection.

7. Pathway to Proceduralism Over Substance
Gideon elevated procedural rights (e.g., having a lawyer) over substantive truth (e.g., actual innocence or guilt).

This shift empowered lawyers more than defendants and helped entrench a system where legal outcomes are driven by strategy and resources, not facts or fairness.

8. Perverse Incentives for Legal Professionals
Once indigent defense became mandatory, law schools, bar associations, and advocacy groups began lobbying for broader legal rights and funding.

This professional self-interest—a form of regulatory capture—results in:

Expanding procedural entitlements

More mandatory legal proceedings

Ever-growing legal budgets

Critics say Gideon marked the beginning of legal bureaucratization, where defending rights is too often a job program for lawyers, not a justice engine for citizens.

9. Crowded Court Systems and Delayed Justice
By requiring lawyers in every felony case, courts became clogged with procedural motions, hearings, and delays.

The system often now rewards those who can “lawyer up” most aggressively, creating inequality between indigent and affluent defendants despite the theoretical goal of fairness.

10. Erosion of Community-Based Justice
Before Gideon, many local courts operated on simpler norms—judges informally guided unrepresented defendants, and many cases were resolved quickly.

Gideon replaced that with formalism and professional gatekeeping, reducing community trust and increasing dependence on legal intermediaries who often lack community accountability.

Summary: A Double-Edged Legacy
While Gideon v. Wainwright is a cornerstone of American civil liberties, it also:

Entrenched a vast lawyer-centric criminal justice apparatus

Enabled rent-seeking by the legal profession

Diverted resources into procedure over substance

Institutionalized ineffective, high-volume public defense systems

Privileged lawyers’ jobs over true community-based justice reform

It is a decision celebrated in principle, but in practice it may have fed a bloated, adversarial, and self-perpetuating legal system that sometimes undermines the very fairness it sought to guarantee.

[Supremacy Claus]

This case began the relentless march toward explosve criminality in the USA. It was intended by the toxic lawyer profession to attack and to America. Only Roe saved us by the in utera incapacitation of 60 million Democrats, 20 million being black. Millions of them would have been Gideons, devastating career criminal alchoholics loosed on crime victims by the toxic lawyer profession. Imagine the total shitholing of America without Roe.

You will not end crime without cancelling the toxic lawyer profession. Arrest its hierarchy, 20000 traitors, including endowed professors. Try them for insurrection against the constitution. Incapacitate them.

[David Nieporent]

This combines Behar's toxic ignorance (including lying about Gideon's cause of death) with AI-generated slop.

[Supremacy Claus]

Hi, David. Thanks for being the only one stupid enough to read my comment, then really stupid enough to reply.

Yes, alcohol consumption is one of the known risk factors for stomach (gastric) cancer, though it is not the sole cause.

Here's how alcohol relates to stomach cancer risk:
✅ Established Risk Factors Related to Alcohol:
Chronic alcohol use (especially heavy drinking) can irritate and inflame the stomach lining (gastritis), increasing cancer risk.

Acetaldehyde, a toxic byproduct of alcohol metabolism, is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer).

Alcohol may increase the risk of H. pylori infection, a key contributor to stomach cancer.

Alcohol can also interfere with nutrient absorption, including folate and other vitamins that protect against DNA damage.

[not guilty]

"The real heist was $trillion in worthless make work jobs for lawyers. The decision was 9-0 in favor of scumbag lawyer thievin'."

Actually, the decision does not require that an appointed lawyer be paid. by the government or otherwise.

[Supremacy Claus]

Free services by a lawyer is a Fifth Amendment taking. It may also be compelled labor in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Public defenders must receive the same salary as prosecutors. They must have the same support staff, including investigators, experts. If they do not, they should be sued for providing ineffective counsel. The conviction should be set aside.

[SMP0328]

2. Judicial Overreach and Federal Mandate
Gideon overruled Betts v. Brady (1942), imposing a nationwide mandate on states to provide counsel in all felony cases, regardless of local conditions or resource capacity.

Betts v. Brady said counsel had to appointed to indigent criminal defendants when there were "special circumstances." That standard proved hopelessly unworkable and by the time of Gideon almost all States were providing for appointed counsel for indigent criminal defendants as routine; Florida was a holdout.

Gideon was basically cleanup work for the Court. It was a unanimous decision, with the only disagreement amongst the Justices being whether Betts should be overruled for being wrong when decided or for proving to be unworkable. For the vast majority of the States, it changed nothing because they were already doing what Gideon required.

[Supremacy Claus]

Gideon Was a Constitutional Imperative — But Its Implementation Became a Rent-Seeking Scheme for the Legal Profession
Gideon Was Not Judicial Overreach — It Corrected a Constitutional Defect
The Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) did not impose unjustified federal authority—it restored Sixth Amendment protections via the Fourteenth Amendment. The case overruled Betts v. Brady (1942), which had allowed states to deny legal counsel unless “special circumstances” existed—a standard so vague and inconsistently applied that it led to routine violations of due process. Gideon made clear that a fair trial is impossible without competent counsel, and that this right applies in all felony cases, across all states.

Yes, 28 States Were Already Providing Counsel — But That’s Exactly the Problem
By the time of Gideon, 28 states had voluntarily adopted policies to provide appointed counsel for indigent defendants in felony cases. However, 12 had not, and even within those 28, there was no constitutional guarantee—just political or statutory choices, vulnerable to budget cuts or shifts in leadership. The Constitution is not optional, and rights should not vary based on ZIP code. The fact that most states were already doing it proves how uncontroversial and urgent national enforcement had become, not that Gideon was unnecessary.

Implementation Was Rapidly Co-Opted by the Legal Bureaucracy
While Gideon was a constitutional victory, its rollout became a massive rent-seeking opportunity for the legal profession. Instead of fostering lean, client-centered defense systems, states created public defender bureaucracies filled with thousands of make-work jobs—largely staffed by attorneys from lower-tier law schools, who often lacked courtroom experience or investigative skills. These jobs offered steady salaries, low accountability, and little incentive to innovate or excel.

Push for Parity Became a Cover for Bureaucratic Expansion
Although Gideon did not require equal pay or staffing parity with prosecutors, legal lobbyists and bar associations seized the opportunity to demand it. This included:

Salary parity laws that inflated payrolls without improving representation quality.

Permanent funding for in-house investigators, social workers, expert witnesses, and clerical staff, regardless of demonstrated need.

Resistance to cost-effective models (e.g., private assigned counsel) in favor of guaranteed public-sector jobs.

This shift transformed Gideon’s mandate into a jobs program, exploiting the Court’s language about the importance of counsel to justify a self-serving legal bureaucracy.

The Result: High Cost, Low Performance, and Client Betrayal
Many public defender offices now consume vast resources while delivering subpar service, with attorneys forced to manage 200–800 cases a year and clients processed in minutes. The defender system, instead of being an instrument of justice, has too often become a paper shield for procedural legitimacy, protecting the system—not the accused.

Conclusion
While Gideon v. Wainwright was a necessary and overdue constitutional correction—especially for the 12 states that refused to guarantee counsel—it was swiftly captured by rent-seeking interests within the legal profession. The result was not simply fairer trials, but a massive public-sector legal industry, dominated by underqualified attorneys with inflated salaries, bureaucratic protections, and minimal accountability. A decision meant to protect the poor was hijacked into a structural subsidy for the lower tier of the legal bar.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

We recently referenced Justice Brennan's retirement.

So, perhaps, we should move to some other moment of SCOTUS history. It is summer, so perhaps there was no case decided on this date. Oh. There is one. U.S. v. Nixon.

This was the "Nixon tapes case" involving the limits of executive privilege. As cap' on his blog notes, the opinion reads like a "time capsule" of another age.

https://www.captcrisis.com/post/today-in-supreme-court-history-july-24-2

I suppose U.S. v. Nixon is one of those opinions, like Bivens, that currently should be limited to its facts. That is, for presidents named "Richard Nixon."

[Frank Drackman]

That's what the Military-Industrial Complex does to POTUS's who end wars

[Supremacy Claus]

Nitpicking as in Watergate must be criminalized as criminal perjury.

[Supremacy Claus]

Bragg and James should be arrested for honest services fraud, misusing tax money to prosecute a policital opponent. These flimsy prosecutions would not happen if Trump were not running.

Give me anyone's laptop, down to toddler age. I will find fendral crimes for decades in prison and $millions in fines. Everyone can be prosecuted. If the purpose is false, the prosecutors must be arrested, tried, and sent to gen pop. The scumbag Supreme Court has given these scumbag lawyers immunity instead. The Supreme Court is among the lawyer hierarchy that has be cancelled, arrested, and incapacitated to save our nation.

[Supremacy Claus]

The scumbag lawyer prosecutor has 2 million prosecutions of a billion crimes a year. That is a 1 in 500 chance of committing a serious crime and ever being inconvenienced by the failed lawyer profession. The gold standard of crime measurement, the Crime Victimization Survey, only counts 8 common law crimes, from the era of Edward I, the 13th Century. When the scumbag prosecutor has a guy, 20% of the time, it is the wrong guy. They then force innocent people to accept plea deals with stacking and crushing legal costs. The direct cost of crime is $trillion. The lawyer profession takes in $1.5 trillion. The indirects damages have not been calculated. That includes health costs of injury, loss of productivity from allowing the criminal to disrupt our schools, our businesses, our lives. It does not include drops in real estate values from a single crime in the vicinity. It certainly does not include the price of fear, of pain, of suffering, of loss of loved ones, of loss of faith, of loss of trust. Those are valued in the $multi-trillions.

What will it take to get rid of this toxic lawyer profession? How much damage can this nation sustain before it decides to end its ordeal?

[not guilty]

"That's what the Military-Industrial Complex does to POTUS's who end wars"

Prick Nixon didn't end a war; he prolonged and expanded it. He sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks in 1968, widened the war into Cambodia, and ended American involvement in 1973 on basically the same terms he could have gotten in 1969.

[Frank Drackman]

Thanks LBJ, how many kids did you kill in Hell today?

[Bob from Ohio]

"I suppose U.S. v. Nixon is one of those opinions, like Bivens, that currently should be limited to its facts. That is, for presidents named "Richard Nixon.""

Well, it was cited in Trump v. US so it has some vitality.

But since the President can control his subordinates, there would be no subpoena in the first place for a sitting president. And since president's discussions with subordinates cannot be used to prove a crime, the tapes could not be subject to a subpoena anyway.

[apedad]

(From Trump v. US)

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts. Pp. 5–43.

So how can Trump be looking to go after Obama now?

Seems like this decision would apply to all former presidents.

[Bob from Ohio]

Got me. You should ask him.

Maybe he just got out his laser pointer and all the cats are chasing after it.

[Frank Drackman]

It’s so future Osamas/Clappers/Brennans will think more than twice before trying this Bullshit again

[Krayt]

Is creating a false narrative an official act? What about a true one, but hyper-exagerated? Well, free speech includes lies, in the context of talk about government, lest the government become arbiter of trVth spoken against it. But what if government does the speaking?

Transparently he's going after an opponent, same thing as against himself. Same thing as against Clinton back in the day. Hyperexaggerators ho!